Hang around with denizens of the DC metro area long enough, and eventually you’ll hear someone lament, “I really don’t take enough advantage of all the things that DC has to offer.”

When we locals have guests in town, we typically make a circuit of the same locations: the memorials around the Tidal Basin, the White House, the National Mall, and depending on the interests of the visitors, some combination of the Mall-adjacent museums: National Gallery, National Air and Space Museum, Natural History Museum, and American History Museum.

But many of those of us who live here rarely bother to venture beyond the tourist highlights to the dozens of other museums that DC has to offer. This is made all the more unforgivable by the fact that the Smithsonian Museums—of which there are 20 in the DC area, mostly centered around the National Mall—are FREE. Plus there’s the Holocaust Museum, the International Spy Museum, National Archives, and various other galleries and historical sites.

This month my photography assignment is architectural photography, so this dreary Sunday morning, I took a 4-mile walk that started by the White House, followed the north side of the Mall down to the Capitol, then circled back along the south side.

I got to thinking how many of the museums I’d never been to… and how long it had been since I’d been to some of the ones I have been to! The Natural History Museum reopened its dinosaur gallery in 2019, and I still haven’t been to see it. At some point the intervention of a global pandemic stopped being an excuse….

I didn’t actually go to a museum today… instead I walked around and got drizzled on and took architectural photos with an impossibly grey sky as a background. This sounds like a poor decision, but in my defense, I was almost ready to go home by the time the museums opened at 10 am.

But I did resolve: once a month, until I run out, I’m going to go to one of DC’s museums, galleries, or other culturally significant sites. I had always intended for this blog to have a touch of DC local flavor for readers coming here as tourists, so this will be my first foray in that direction.

In two weeks, I fly to Milan for 2 and half weeks in Italy! Much more to follow on this, but for the moment, the point is, October is rather packed, so expect the first museum to arrive in November.